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The purpose of this study is to understand the roles played by domestic violence prevention officers and social workers in handling domestic violence cases in Hualien County. What is the division of labor? What are the overlaps? What do they expect from each other? What is the operating mode of social work network cooperation? What would be the difficulties and challenges of cooperation in domestic violence cases encountered by domestic violence prevention officers and social workers? This study adopts the qualitative research method. It also takes advantage of the individual "in-depth interviews" method. It selects interviewees with the "intentional sampling" method by interviewing a total of 5 domestic violence prevention officers and 3 adult protection social workers through verbatim transcripts and observations. Data from those who handle domestic violence cases in the service unit will be collected to analyze and summarize. The results and findings of the study are as follows: 1.The overlapping work of the domestic violence prevention officers and the social workers "mutually" includes reporting domestic violence cases, safeguarding the personal safety of the victims, assisting the victims in the injury inspection, collecting evidence, assisting the victims to apply for a protection order, actively requesting emergency protection from the Court orders and linking related resources and referrals for the victims. Domestic violence prevention officers are majorly responsible for most of the work of protection orders. In addition, the protection of the victims’ safety, assistance to victims, and evidence collection are mostly done by the domestic violence officers. Consequently, social workers will be focusing on drawing up a safety plan for the case and providing follow-up related treatments, which naturally forms a division of labor. 2.The domestic violence prevention officers expect the social workers to provide asylum and placement for victims, to temporarily ensure their safety. For some special cases (mental disabilities, alcoholism), the social workers need to provide relevant resources to victims in a contextualized way. The expectations of domestic violence prevention officers and the social workers will be the foundation of the important consensus with each other. Their positions should be clear and straightforward. However, some police are trapped in old thinking. Refreshing old domestic violence awareness of them is in need. 3.The conflicting factors of domestic violence prevention officers and social workers originate from the expectations of the partnership.They include the domination of handling the case, the attitude of the domestic violence prevention officer toward the social workers, their different perspectives of problem-solving, and the unclear professional understanding of each other. Contrarily, when they do not account for each other who pays more, who pays less, naturally there will be no conflict. 4.The usage mode of the network cooperation of the domestic violence prevention officers and social workers could be sorted in descending frequency order: information sharing, consultation, division of labor, and cooperation (joint visits). Due to lack of manpower and time, domestic violence prevention officers and social workers will do their work individually in most cases with information sharing to achieve the purpose of network cooperation. For high-risk cases only, the domestic violence prevention officers and the social labors collaboratively make joint visits. The rest of the cases would be kept to be done alone in their respective fields. 5.The greatest pressure on the practical work of domestic defense officers and social workers comes from the heavy workload and the occurrence of major domestic violence incidents. In addition, the practical difficulties and challenges encountered by domestic violence prevention officers and social workers are safety issues (including the security of visits and office), difficulties in handling domestic violence ( including domestic violence not included in criminal case performance), failure to implement the agency system, and a formality of the community domestic violence officers.
In response to results and findings, this research proposes recommendations on the domestic violence treatment process and domestic violence policy, reflections of researchers, as well as recommendations for victims, domestic violence prevention officers, police officers, social workers, social administration units, and police agencies.
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